A common and reasonable requirement would be to secure communications of the control plane for BGP between two neighbors to provide data authentication, confidentiality and anti-replay. Since BGP does not possess any inherent security mechanism other than MD5 authentication (and…

I took and failed the CCIE R&S v5 lab last Friday. It was my first attempt at the version 5 and third overall. I wanted to throw some random tidbits out there about my impression of the lab while withholding anything that…

The industry is abuzz about the ongoing transformation of the data center! With technologies like SDN, OpenStack and so called “white box” switching, insiders have voiced their opinion that these changes spell certain trouble for status quo players like Cisco. Cisco…

I was looking for an external USB enclosure to house a spare 256 GB SDD that I have laying here on my desk. While looking around I noticed a housing for about $20 on Amazon that boasts support of “UASP.”…

Alternate title: Monday morning musing on the RSTP backup port role. Arguably the most misunderstood role in RSTP is the so called “backup” port role. The mantra of this role is typically that this type of port should not been…

In the Future of Networking with Fred Baker Fred mentioned an interesting IPv6 deployment scenario: give a /64 prefix to every server to support container deployment, and run routing protocols between servers and ToR switches to advertise the /64 prefix to the data center fabric preferably using link-local addresses.Let’s recap:Read more ...